Knoxville. Pre-collapse metro population pushing nine hundred and fifty thousand.
We didn’t need Grok to run the tally because the math was carved into the geography. Roughly nine thousand five hundred walkers milled the asphalt and off-ramps, waiting for a noise or a scent. Nine hundred forty thousand dead sat locked in their beds, behind heavy doors, or sealed inside the dark vertical hives of the office parks and apartment blocks. And somewhere out there across the broader region, just about five hundred living souls, the immune, were hiding in the dark and trying to breathe. Maybe.
Jack shifted the 4Runner into park and killed the engine. The silence rushed in through the floorboards. Raych sat beside him, watching the shadows lengthen across the interstate overpass below.
Behind them, the convoy had bunched up on the frozen gravel shoulder of the ridge. Earl cut the massive diesel engine of the Peterbilt with a deep, vibrating shudder, and Kaylah stepped down from the passenger side, shaking the road-stiff out of her legs. A few yards back, Tom killed the lights on the F-150. He climbed out from the driver’s side while Sarah and Mikey, his twelve-year-old grandson, secured the tailgate gear in the back before joining him at the front.
Tom walked up, holding an unlit cigar between his teeth, and looked down at the sprawling, silent gray of Knoxville.
“Clubhouse cellar off Kingston Pike?” Tom asked, eyeing the distance.
“If the locals didn’t drink it dry on the way out,” Jack said, his hand resting on the steering wheel.
“And if they did?”
“Then we make do with whatever’s left on the top shelf,” Jack said, his gaze fixed on the darkening valley. “Or we clear a path until we find a private stash that survived the panic. Rye’s harder to find than it used to be. People panic-bought the sweet stuff first. Left the spice behind for the hard cases.”
Tom gave a slow, dry nod, chewing on his cigar. “Check the pro shop annex while you’re at it. The head pro was a snob. Imported single-origin Ethiopian stuff, sealed in vacuum tins with one-way valves. If the mice didn’t chew through the foil, it’s better than anything we’ve had since the world stopped tasting like coffee.”
Raych smiled faintly from the passenger seat, resting her elbow on the center console. “A man who risks his neck for a good pour of rye is eccentric, Tom. A man who hunts specialty roast in the middle of the apocalypse is a connoisseur.”
“You drink freeze-dried chicory for a month, Raych, and you’ll risk your neck for a bag of beans with a roast date on it,” Jack muttered.
Before dropping back into the driver’s seat, Jack popped the tailgate of the 4Runner. MREs were for people who had given up. He reached past his gear bag and pulled out a heavy #10 canvas sack tied off with hemp twine, setting it down next to good old Coleman, as Mikey had named the camp stove. He unlatched the burner and flicked the striker; the blue flame hissed to life against the gathering dark.
Into an enameled pot went water, a smashed clove of garlic, a strip of salt-cured bacon, and a handful of dried Rancho Gordo Cranberry beans, cream colored, with purple stripes. Sooner or later, these too would run out. Jack made a mental note of good beans on his shopping list of Rye whiskey, coffee, and cigars.
As the first faint smell of garlic, pork fat, and wood smoke started to cut through the freezing mountain air, Jack let out a long breath.
“Three hours to soften up,” Jack said, watching the blue flame dance against the pot. “We let the beans simmer, we finish the perimeter check, and then we go down and see what kind of rye and coffee a dead city left behind for us.”
Below them, the Sunsphere caught the last dying slice of orange light before dusk swallowed the valley whole. Nine thousand five hundred teeth, nine hundred thirty-nine thousand five hundred twenty-five dead, four hundred seventy-five living ghosts scattered across the dark, and a pot of heirloom beans starting to bubble on the tailgate.
Survival wasn’t just about keeping a pulse. It was about refusing to let your standards die before you did.